Thousands of customers complainedįrontier's slow speeds led to many customer complaints. "Since at least January 2015, thousands of consumers complained to Frontier and government agencies that the company failed to provide DSL Internet service at the speeds they were promised," the FTC's announcement of the lawsuit said. But provisioning sets an upper limit on speed, so customers can't get more than what they're provisioned, even in cases where the network is technically capable of providing the higher speeds an ISP claims to be selling them. The FTC lawsuit alleged that Frontier often imposed speed caps that were lower than the speeds customers paid for, saying that the ISP "provisioned consumers for slower speeds than the tiers of DSL Internet service to which they are subscribed." Provisioning low speeds is often done because of real network limits. This analysis found that approximately 440,000 of Frontier's DSL subscribers, or nearly 30 percent of the population analyzed, were "potentially" "oversold" on speed tiers that exceeded the actual speeds Frontier provided to them. In early 2019, a management consulting firm analyzed, at Frontier's direction and with Frontier's participation, Frontier's proprietary network data and internal records for nearly 1.5 million then-current DSL subscribers. A consultant's study found that nearly 30 percent of Frontier's DSL customers were likely to receive speeds slower than what they paid for, the lawsuit said: The inherent limitations of copper-line DSL mean that speeds are slower for customers who live farther away from the nearest fiber node. Frontier provides residential DSL Internet service to about 1.3 million consumers across 25 states. Frontier's failure to invest sufficiently in fiber was a major cause of its bankruptcy last year. The lawsuit concerns the advertised speeds of DSL, which Frontier offers over copper lines in places where it has not upgraded to fiber-to-the-home. California-based customers are represented in the suit by the district attorneys of Los Angeles County and Riverside County. The complaint was filed in US District Court for the Central District of California by the FTC and attorneys general from Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. The Federal Trade Commission and officials from six states yesterday sued Frontier Communications, alleging that the telecom provider misrepresented Internet speeds and charged many customers for higher speeds than it actually provided or was capable of providing.
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